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Find the Heart!

About: Happiness is invisible? Then you cannot sell it? You cannot copy it nor like it:-) You have to arrive there yourself??? But i am just a consumer! See Baudrillard, La societe de consommation, p60....
More About contrechoc »

What is it?
A device to show the distance to another person in a funny way. You can wear it like a watch, or it can be included in clothing.
What is the goal:
To make people aware that they have to find the right distance in every relation, and that, if they come too close to another...then even the best friendships can come to a miserable end....give each person the space and the air she or he needs!

This is a very easy interactive device to make (because all the difficult parts are in the hardware - but ... you have to buy this hardware to make life easy...). The device indicates the right distance to another person, not too far away and not too close. It shows the right distance with an 8x8 representation of a heart. You have to find this heart! (Which might be a different distance for each person.)
Well that is the game!

you see the 1's form a cross. The ones means color and the color r g b values are given in the parameters of the function. In our sketch we had a random choice for the colors, changing all the time.

Step 5: Textile

Making the textile casing.

We are very demanding! Only technical stuff is fun (when it works) but it does not look very nice :-)

So we always search for an expression, and we like softening the technical stuff. Textile is a nice material to work with and we have the illusion that electronics in clothing will be the future. Nothing to withhold us from dreaming!

Back to reality:

The technical stuff stack of shields and matrix is 3.5 centimeters high so we have to do some filling in the textile wrapper. We used for that the fluffy cloth. This can be cut with scissors.
Then for the covering (hiding the hardware in the textile) we used elastic cloth.
Because we just played with a lasercutter we have burnt our logo's into the cloth.

Step 6: Display

Finished and on display!

Here you see the comfort zone sensor in action. Our device of 70 euro's had to compete with other LED displays of more than several thousands of euro's. But the biggest problem proved to be it being displayed outside in the bright light of the first (and only) blazing sun of the whole summer of our rainy Holland!

Step 7: Making Pictures

It proved very difficult to take pictures of the LED RGB matrix. Either it was too bright, or you got a single line on the LED block.
You can adapt the refreshing speed in the Colorduino library: Colorduino.cpp line 66: TCNT1 = 0x64; if you change this to TCNT1 = 0x16; and take a bright +2.0 EV for your digital camera it just shows the whole picture. In an editor you can lower the brightness and the colors return.

Step 8: Conclusion

Even if clothing and textiles become electronic, intelligent and expressive... the sun might ruin all our nice expressions, making projections of clothing, color change and all other nice futuristic ideas just invisible outside!

These pictures are from the PICNIC festival in Amsterdam 2011, outside, where the effect is nearly invisible. Contrechoc.com and http://by-wire.net presented there together.

As mentioned in the intro, adding an LDR for not wasting energy in bright daylight will improve the energy consumption. It will only show up in darker environments, rooms.

Then about the competition with the super big and super bright RGB screens at PICNIC. Of course these screens are bigger, even very big. But what do these screens show really? Only publicity nobody looks at. Are these screens interactive, reacting on passers by? No, not at all. So comparing the budgets and the interactivity of our micro RGB screen it did quite well, and it provoked more fun.

Another extraordinary project, and even exposed it on Picnic!Nice this comfort-zone-warning-system. But also something that could make people even less using their natural and authentic qualities for social behavior and fitting etiquette.In this context indeed, the wedding butterfly is more positive, I guess. Lets try to make a next, most positive, expression tool the next time! Nice goal, isn't it?